Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

We were recently working on another Persian project for iOS called Zangoole. Zangoole is a Song and Story library for kids and it’s available on AppStore right now!

Here’s the AppStore Description and Screenshots :

Zangoole is a complete Persian application for kids. Using this free app you can purchase audio songs and stories from the largest collection of children’s Persian audio store.
With this app you no longer need to worry about a bed time story.
The stories and songs are interesting and morally sound while at the same time help in improving your child’s Persian skills.

Features:
★ Easy to use and simple User-Interface designed with kids in mind.
★ 2 free songs and 2 free stories, so you can get a general understanding of the quality and style of other items.
★ We plan on releasing new songs and stories onto the shop every month.

Zangoole was a collaboration between Turned on Digital and Ariaman Yar. Contact us via hello@turnedondigital.com.

It’s a while we are developing an interactive book application framework for iPad and the first book in these series is now right on App Store. Monkey’s Paw is a horror short story by W.W.Jacobs which was published in 1902. You can watch a demo video here.

We recently released a new version of Persian Poems, called Persian Poems Library which supports In-App-Purchase and it’s Free ! You can use it to browse the bookshop and buy and read your favorite poems right on your iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Here’s a quick look at the features :

– Currently there are more than 20 books available in the shop, and more on the way.
– Browse or Search for poems
– Save your favorites
– Change text size
– A small biography of each poet is also available in each book
– Completely in Persian (Farsi)
– Share verses via email, Twitter and Facebook
– We’re planing on adding 10 new books each month

Although it is less than a week that it has been released, we’re impressed by the high download rate. Here’s a few screen-shots of the app :

Keyboard functions have major functionality on operating systems other than MacOSX. Soon when you install Ubuntu on your Macbook, you’ll notice different problems from default keyboard function keys behavior (which needs Fn key to be hold) to extremely slow touch-pad. Most of issues and their solutions are described on the Ubuntu Macbook wiki page. But recent kernels have had some modifications that parameters described over the net, do not cover how to fix the issue with newer kernels. The old way of fixing keyboard was to add an option to Human Interface Device (HID) module of kernel to switch function keys mode. For example you might add the following contents to /etc/modprobe.d/functions.conf :

options hid pb_fnmode=2

Replace hid with usbhid for kernels older than 2.6.20. But none of them worked for my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid running a 2.6.32 kernel. In recent kernels, Apple HIDs have a separate kernel module named hid-apple and the parameter has been changed to fnmode. Knowing these changed I tried to change the parameter by providing fnmode parameter via modprobe just like before, but failed. So to fix keyboard issue I used /sys/ interface to change fnmode parameter of hid_apple module.

root@Seeb:/home/ali# echo 2 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode

Put this in your startup script /etc/rc.local before exit command, so that the issue gets fixed automatically on each boot. If you don’t know how to edit the file using root priviledges, that’s easy ! Press Alt+F2 and type the following command in your Run dialog :

gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local

For you touch-pad speed issue, all you need to do is to install gsynaptics (qsynaptics for KDE guys) package, open Touchpad Preferences from System > Preferences > Touchpad, and increase the newly shown parameters “Min Speed” and “Max Speed”:

Userspace Filesystem Drivers are becoming more and more popular since they’re portable and have less headache of platform specific filesystem driver issues. For example, NTFS-3G project provides the full read/write support for NTFS under Linux and MacOSX while living in userspace.

I recently discovered an open source project called “fuse-ext2” which is an implementation of Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 filesystem driver in userspace. Before this one, there was an ext2-only native kernel extension (kext) implementation. So I had no write access to my Ext3 and no read access to Ext4 file-system at all.

To use and enable experimental write support for your Ext2 partition, follow these steps :

Download and install NTFS-3G Package which includes FUSE libraries.
AFAIK NTFS-3G has been renamed into Tuxera NTFS and is a shareware now. But any way you can download the old GPL version here. it works in both Leopard and Snow Leopard..

As you probably know, we’ve released our first iPhone application named Persian Poems one month ago. Today we decided to push the first update for it to introduce some new features and fix minor bugs we had found and release a second version with new books and graphics. So I started with creating and dumping and organizing the new books for the second edition and we all three were testing and fixing bugs there in the garage. It will hopefully turn into a faster and more stable application since the poem catching process is now being done in a background worker thread and have almost no impact on user scrolling experience.

I’ve also done some performance tests on Movie Buff and Persian Poems to find the funny memory leaks. This page helped me a lot to start off the play with Apple Instruments tool and as a result both applications are completely clean now ! and I have to wash my hands ! 🙂

Unfortunately the micro-transaction system needs more work and the exams will start in near 3-4 days and this is the fact that why we decided to do some time-boxing for the features we’re going to present in this update.

There were also some critical problems with the Movie Buff which is available on App-store for a week or so. We’ve fixed them and hope that apple will release the update soon to prevent these 1-start ratings.